Just Finished Reading: Modernism – A Very Short Introduction by Christopher Butler (FP: 2010)

Now I’d be the first to admit that Art of any kind, and never mind Modern Art, is a little outside my comfort/knowledge zone in the reading about it department. So I have to admit that I did struggle more than a little with this book despite its paltry 102 pages.

Concentrating on works from 1909-1939, some of which I knew and others I already liked (most notably Guernica by Picasso - finished in 1937), I actually managed to learn a great deal about artists I’d never heard of before pushing the boundaries of art (not just painting) in all directions both sides of WW1. So impressive was this outpouring that some commentators at the time blamed Modernist thought and the Avant-Garde in general for provoking the Great War. Maybe another look at it would see WW1 as part of the energetic energy of the New (Modern) Age?

The philosophy of Modernism centred around change, technology, speed and the urban environment canonising machines and just about anything that called the existing bourgeois values and standards into question attacking anything that smacked of traditionalism. Largely from the Left politically, though not exclusively as evinced by the Italian Futurists who closely associated with Italian Fascists, much modern art was vilified both in Germany and Italy as decadent and much was publically (and regrettably) destroyed during WW2.

Giving rise to artistic styles as diverse as Cubism, Surrealism, Dadaism, Bauhaus, and Neoclassicism and producing artists as varied as Henri Bergson, Berthold Brecht, Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dali, T.S Eliot, James Joyce, Wassily Kandinsky, D H Lawrence, Rene Magritte, Pablo Picasso, Erik Satie, Igor Stravinsky and Virginia Woolf this was an artistic movement the like of which had never been seen before and which is still reverberating through cultures across the world and still with the power to shock, awe and amuse in equal measure. Some of it I regard as junk, some I look at with stunned incomprehension and others I look at or listen to with feelings of transcendent joy. If you want to know more about the phenomena of Modernism I suggest that this is a pretty good place to start with lots of ideas to follow up.